President Obama sent out the biggest, loudest warning sign yet about the health risks of playing football. But when his words, in an interview in The New Republic, hit the nation’s eyes and ears last weekend, the only thing remembered was “the NFL.”

That’s the context into which Obama’s remarks have been placed—mainly, “If I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football.”

But the core of football’s problems lies right where he put them, with athletes much younger than those in the NFL.

In fact, he didn’t mince words about the players one level below the pros, and those words packed just as strong a punch.

“I tend to be more worried about college players than NFL players in the sense that the NFL players have a union, they’re grown men, they can make some of these decisions on their own, and most of them are well-compensated for the violence they do to their bodies,” Obama said in the interview.

“You read some of these stories about college players who undergo some of these same problems with concussions and so forth and then have nothing to fall back on. That’s something that I’d like to see the NCAA think about.”

The reaction by the founder of the closest thing college players have to a union? “The president is right.”

Ramogi Huma, president of the California-based National College Players Association, released a statement Monday pointing out that what Obama said in the interview is precisely what his group has been pushing since its inception in 2001.

Just a week earlier, Huma had been quoted in the Birmingham (Ala.) News as demanding that the NCAA take the lead in protecting players from the effects of head injuries, and supporting research of the type that had uncovered examples of the degenerative brain disease CTE in living athletes. He also noted that members of his council—former college athletes such as himself—were “uneasy” as they discussed the discovery of CTE in Hall of Famer Junior Seau, who committed suicide last May.

“Look at the attention the NFL has gotten on this subject, and it’s a fraction of the number of players who play college football,” Huma told the paper. “How is college football going to invest in its players? Not just lip service, but actual dollars. We need the research. We need the treatment.”

On top of all that, back in June, when the BCS powers agreed to a playoff system for 2014, the NCPA immediately spoke up and prodded the NCAA to steer a sizable chunk of the billions the playoff will generate to fund concussion studies, and to provide full health insurance benefits to all athletes, as it currently does not under scholarship rules.

(And yes, it’s very much worth mentioning that Obama publicly nudged college sports to put in a playoff more than four years ago. It might have been political grandstanding. It definitely still happened afterward. It certifiably can’t be ruled out that his push actually moves processes like this along.)

Neither Huma nor his organization have grabbed the traction for their cause that they’d like—the average college football fan barely knows of their existence and are as resistant to any threat to the style of play to which they’re accustomed as many NFL fans are.

Yet every player in the NFL played in college and beat astronomical odds to get there—a reminder of exactly how many young men play college football at all levels, from the BCS conferences down to junior colleges. And those are the ones chosen from the millions who play in high school, who are chosen from the millions who play youth ball.

And by the time the NFL is involved, the problem likely is too far gone, the damage too irreversible and the players too set in their ways.

Still, all the noise about player safety surrounds the NFL, understandably. If some 3,000 former NFL players, and counting, believe that playing in the league has damaged them enough to give them grounds for a lawsuit, imagine how many that played college ball might have the same grounds, but not the means or organization to act on them.

President Obama has a sense of how large that number might be. Huma has a sense, too.

“I applaud the President for speaking out, and urge his continued leadership on this matter,” Huma’s statement from the NCPA read, in part. It continued: “It’s time for the NCAA to stop denying athletes the most basic of rights and protections—due process, comprehensive health care, and adequate safety precautions.”

The alarms should be going off long before the NFL becomes involved. They should have gone off long before the President of the United States noticed, too.